Look and feel are Evil Tonight’s strongest points. San Paolo De Rosa is like Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, but with more horse props and visually murdered mannequins. Doors, as expected, are locked with symbol keys. Most containers require letter and number combinations. Investigating every shelf is necessary. Evil Tonight is at its best  when the player has memorized enough of the campus to make a linear line of progress corresponding to getting a new key item. The hospital wing’s freezer is boarded up with wooden boards. One dance studio is blocked off by fire. How can someone lose a giant gold horse’s head? The save rooms are expectantly calm meditative offices and backroom closets.

Alberto V’s  designs and sprite work echo early 90’s Japanese video game and anime art. It maintains a  distinct 80’s look s, like how Nina from the first two Breath of Fire’s has massive hair, and many of the characters look like the cat women from Dominion Tank Police. Artistically, the game ends up being this weird-but-good mix of Masamune Shirow characters stuck in a ballet institute that reminds me of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, what with fighting fire spirits, hungry chests, and nicely dressed women who vomit bats. Sylvia, with her constant dialogue about how hot she is and how great she is at her job, are even reminiscent of Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair.

All of the puzzles are recognizable from other survival horror or point-n-click games, and thankfully  one of them was not a dreaded tile puzzle where you have to make a pattern with a free space. Most of them are difficult enough to make you feel smart when given a minute or two to figure out. The one exception is around the end of the game, where I learned online that a specific  puzzle was different each playthrough. These late-end puzzles require referencing notes created over the course of the game, so often I was not totally lost; however,  this jewelry box puzzle added thirty minutes of backtracking everywhere because I felt I had missed something. See also: the slide projection puzzle that felt unfinished, even though it was solvable. Evil Tonight can be beaten in a long afternoon, so this section of “am I just dumb or is something important just poorly explained ” stood out. At least it was not the original Resident Evil 3’s impossible music puzzle that might have diagnosed me with tone-deafness.

While asking a little much of a small team, there needed to be more horror set pieces. Because the academy has been abandoned for years, the only grisly murders are done to mannequins is the problem with most survival horror games, these memorable instances start to drop off during the middle of the game. Evil Tonight is  more spooky, like a mannequin that seems to be bleeding from its caved-in head in a bathroom stall, and it would be a mistake to turn too edgy. For instance, taking a page from Corpse Party’s world of cute sprite characters dealing with whatever horrible mess Corpse Party revels in (if memory serves, it’s urination humiliation). It’s a little nit-pick, but the overall character dialogue is rather goofy, Sylvia says the phrase “flaming underpants” at one point, for a game about class struggle and artistic labor.

Pros: Fantastic answer to the question “what if someone made a Suspiria GBA game that played like Resident Evil but with better controls?”, something so narrow that only someone like me would ask it. Overall impressive visual and graphical design. Actual easy mode for folks who like to play Silent Hill with  combat easy and puzzles medium.

Cons: Later puzzles could have used some clearer instructions. Becomes rather combat-heavy for a game supposedly about hunting for ammo in an office waste basket.

Evil Tonight is available on Steam and the Switch. Evil Tonight is a genre combination that works well and continues the sentiment that only indie studios will make granular interest games like this. The small size reflects the short playtime of its influence from Resident Evil, and I hope Evil Tonight gets a sequel set in a haunted police station that just so happens to be built on top of a secret corporate laboratory. Hopefully next time, Sylvia will be taken more seriously as a medium/ghost hunter. 

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